Why we all love Bridget Jones

 By Ian Watson  

Director Beeban Kidron gets her feet up on the couch and explains what makes the Jones girl so interesting.

WHETHER you care to admit it or not, an inner Bridget Jones lurks within each of us. She lies waiting, oversize glass of Chardonnay and half-smoked fag in hand, waiting to wreak merry, farcical havoc at the most inopportune moment. All she needs is the right catalyst, the subconscious trigger that shatters your carefully constructed social mores and ties your shoelaces together while you aren't looking. For Beeban Kidron, the director of our girl's second foray into amiable cinematic chaos, Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, that catalyst is a certain parlour game (clue: one word, two syllables). "I'd rather not spend the weekend with someone than be put on the spot and have to play charades," laughs the 43-year-old, best known for the 1990 TV adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and documentary feature Hookers, Hustlers, Pimps And Their Johns. "Scrabble, the same. So many things."

"You walk in a room and think 'Is tonight the night I'm going to say the most stupid thing and everyone's going to look at me like I'm an idiot?' I'm not an idiot, but between my expectation of myself – where I say the cleverest, wittiest, most insightful thing – and the reality, where I just dribble on like everybody else, is my place of failure. That what I'm interested in and that's my analysis of why people love Bridget."

The first film, Bridget Jones's Diary, came out in 2001 and ended with the bumbling singleton staggering into the arms of Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Since then, much has happened to the actress who portrays her, Renée Zellweger. She picked up a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Cold Mountain and found her own Darcy in the form of Jack White of The White Stripes. In Bridgetworld, however, a mere six weeks (and, as Bridget crows at the beginning of the film, "71 ecstatic shags") have elapsed. And although her circumstances have changed, she's still the same old, gloriously unwaiflike Bridget.

While weight was a daily issue for Bridget in the first film, in the follow-up, it seems as if she's given up the struggle and admitted she's fat and always will be. Kidron sees it all as development of the character. "We were trying to grow her up a bit," she nods. "When you're single, you're obsessed in a very individualistic way. As someone in a new relationship, you're very obsessed about the relationship. So in the first movie, she does a lot of damage to her own self-image. In the second movie, she does a lot of damage to the relationship. Through our lives, our issues change, but our personality does not."

The central question of the second film is: what happens after the happy ending? How do you cope with having a real-life Prince Charming slumbering in your bed? In Bridget's case, it seems to be with a lot of dewy-eyed staring. "The staring thing gets such a huge laugh in the cinema," says Kidron. "Because people so understand all the longing and the unspoken emotion. Women drown themselves in the early part of the relationship to the point where they don't recognise themselves, and then they attack the thing they've fought to have."

It's not long before the obsessive nature of Bridget's relationship with Darcy spills over into jealousy – of Darcy's younger, more elegant colleague Rebecca. (Or as Bridget puts it: "Only 22, legs up to there and Daddy owns half of Scotland.")

To compound matters, it becomes clear during their many arguments about everything from social justice to schooling that Bridget and Darcy hardly have anything in common. You can't help but wonder why they're together.

"When you look at the couples whose relationships work, it is a complete mystery," Kidron says. "There are people who theoretically should be getting on brilliantly and don't. And there are people who apparently have nothing in common who are tight."

"Darcy assumes many of the certainties of his class, his education, his gender. And she is flailing around and assuming absolutely nothing. So she finds that fantastically attractive. And then oppressive, which is her journey. He, meanwhile, finds his own self stiff, unyielding, not spontaneous; bound by the norms of the society in which he's grown up. And she seems brilliant and dastardly and glorious."

Nevertheless, apart from a take-off of The Sound Of Music at the start of the film, with Darcy and Bridget running towards each other in slow motion, we don't actually see the couple enjoying their relationship. She's irrational; he forgives her. She's irrational again; he forgives her again.

"I did shoot more of them getting on," Kidron admits, "and there's nothing more dull. There's a scene that will be on the DVD about them going to the cinema and she's late. He says 'I've been waiting to see this film for 11 years and it's the last showing tonight' and off they go for pizza and a shag. I totally knew that moment."

But once again, he's forgiving her. It would have been nice to have seen an instance of her giving something back, of her opening up that stiffness. When Darcy invited Bridget to an important function, she is keen to impress but true to form fails spectacularly. Darcy's reaction, meanwhile, is typically repressed. "He gets annoyed at the Law Council dinner, but he gets annoyed in a Darcy way," says Kidron. "The thing is, if he could just say: 'There is appropriate behaviour and there's inappropriate behaviour and you let me down by coming in with your make-up all over your face and being rude to my friends'. If he'd have been a person who could have said all that, it would have been a different movie. It is also about his failings as well as hers."

Kidron's right, of course. My annoyance is actually with Darcy – for not being able to express himself fully or conduct their relationship on an equal footing (as a friend rather than the stereo typical "provider"). Such is my dissatisfaction with Darcy that when Daniel Cleaver, pitched brilliantly again by Hugh Grant, reappears and starts displaying genuine charm and warmth – albeit for inevitably dubious reasons (the phrase "weekend shagathon" sticks in the mind) – I'm on the side of the devil. But rather than having a typically male response, Kidron says I've mirrored Bridget's feelings and frustrations.

"That's what Bridget feels. Exactly. 'Loosen up, you bastard. Give me a good time'. It is about the female experience.

"This is a film from that perspective. And that's what makes it interesting because that's the film you don't usually get. You get the pretty boy meets the pretty girl and they theoretically don't get on over a lot of spurious issues and then they make up in the rain. Here you have a much more complex landscape. It's about class and aspiration and lack of perfection."

The ultimate thing to remember, Kidron says, about the way she's handled Bridget and Darcy's relationship, is that it's a romantic comedy. It doesn't need to be realistic.

"It is supposed to be, I don't want to say parody, but it's six inches above reality," Kidron concedes. "If you want reality TV, it's all there. You go to the movies for distillation of experience."

Most comedies of this type end in a marriage, but Kidron manages to employ the cliché without having to surrender to it. "The film's actually about relationships and commitment," she says. "Bridget goes off on this mad comic journey and comes back and says to Darcy 'I'll have you the way you are. We are imperfect creatures and we'll find a way together and it won't be easy'. Which is where you come to in a healthy relationship."

And the future for Bridget? "It all rests with Helen Fielding," she smiles. "I find it absolutely fascinating that Helen had a child this summer." Bridget knee deep in nappies and baby sick? What a v v good idea.